Talon

A Vagrant + Puppet Highly Portable Configured Development Box

Todo

• Write summary and update this readme file
• figure out a way to auto checkout, fetch and update all projects on build (maybe this can be a list of things in hiera... https://docs.puppetlabs.com/hiera/1/complete_example.html)
• similarly, have a way to install packages I like
• set up a basic postgres install (http://jes.al/2014/04/setup-dev-environment-using-vagrant-puppet-part-ii/)
• figure out the ssh agent so i don't have to enter the key password all the time
• mouse support
• setup and configure vim:
  • https://forge.puppetlabs.com/saz/vim
  • http://statico.github.io/vim.html
  • http://nvie.com/posts/how-i-boosted-my-vim/
    • syntastic
    • you complete me
    • knwang/dotfiles

Known Issues

• April 8, 2015: bundler is not available after entering an rvm controller project, requiring manually selecting the ruby version with rvm, detailed here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29520563/why-does-bundler-disapear-after-entering-project-directory-with-puppet-installed

Installation Steps

• Download this source
• vagrant up
• vagrant ssh
• install the vim plugins
• load the correct fonts /fonts to your local system

Based on this good work:

Librarian-puppet-vagrant

inspired by https://github.com/purple52/librarian-puppet-vagrant also: http://pivotallabs.com/spinning-useful-vms-quickly-vagrant-puppet-puppet-forge/

This is a little example framework that shows how you can use Librarian-puppet to manage Puppet modules when provisioning a virtual machine managed using Vagrant.

Why?

No-one likes re-inventing the wheel, but using existing Puppet modules can be a fiddle unless you use something to manage download and installation. If you're using Vagrant and stand-alone Puppet to manage a VM, it can be even more of a fiddle. Do you clone the modules from various git repositories? Create them as submodules in your own repository? Install them on the host, or on the guest?

Librarian-puppet can help by managing the Puppet modules used by your Vagrant box. But, there is a problem: you can't use Puppet to install Librarian-puppet because your Puppet manifests won't compile until your modules are installed.

Solution

The simple solution implemented here uses a shell provisioner in your Vagrant configuration to install and run Librarian-puppet before your Puppet provisioner runs.

How to use

This repository is really just a template; copy the relevant files into your own project. Here's a breakdown of what's required:

• Vagrantfile - the included example has three important sections:
  • A VirtualBox configuration line to allow symlinking in your Vagrant root
  • A shell provisioner definition
  • A Puppet provisioner definition
• shell/main.sh - a simple shell provisioner to install and run Librarian-puppet. Note that it requires git to be installed on your VM, so either install it on your basebox or add a line in the shell provisioner to install it; an example is in the file. You also need to configure this script to install Puppet modules in the correct place. By default, it will put them in /etc/puppet.
• puppet/Puppetfile - configuration describing what Puppet modules to install. See the Librarian-puppet project for details.
• puppet/manifests/main.pp - your main Puppet manifest.
• puppet/.gitignore - configured to ignore temporary directories and files created by Librarian-puppet.

Contribute

Patches and suggestions welcome.

Issues

Please raise issues via the github issue tracker.

License

Please see the LICENSE file.